[lamontcg]

> Is anyone really believing a lawyer is that stupid?

There's over a million lawyers in the United States.

You'd expect at least one of them to be a 1-in-a-million level of bad, or 4.7 standard deviations below the mean assuming a Gaussian distribution of competency.

An average person would normally never come across that lawyer in their lifetime, but media will find that lawyer and amplify their mistakes to everyone in the population.

[codeflo]

There's no reason to believe it's a Gaussian distribution around the mean. Given that there are admission tests, you'd rather hope it's only the tail end of a Gaussian distribution, with the cutoff being what's required to pass the bar.

[lamontcg]

There's going to be a distribution around the mean of the proctoring of those tests. There may even be outright corruption and bribery going on at the tail end.

[drc500free]

Is there a term for this "winning the lottery jackpot is unbelievably unlikely, but every week we hear about someone winning it" effect? People get it when the media reports on the lottery, but somehow miss the amplifying effect on pretty much any other topic.

[jmopp]

There is Littlewood's Law: a miracle (defined as a one in a million event) happens about once a month (assuming you observe one event every second and are observing your surroundings for 8 hours a day). There is also the law of truly large numbers: given a sufficiently large sample space, you will observe the very unlikely events